The noisy chatter at the table ground to a halt. “Ladies’ luck.”

“Pa, leave her out of this,” Matt said, standing up.

“It’s all right,” I said to him. I knew luck had nothing to do with it. I would have chosen statistical probabilities over luck any day. Without hesitation, I pointed to the queen of spades and the seven of diamonds.

“Really,” said Matt’s father thoughtfully. “Strange, strange. But maybe… if…”

He withdrew those two cards slowly from his hand and threw them on the table. There was a sudden roar from the others and a few of them glared at me. When the upheaval was over, Matt’s father scooped up the rest of the money on the table.

He was grinning from ear to ear, revealing a tooth capped with gold. He took a sip of his drink and came over to us again. He reached out and clumsily patted me on the head, as if I were a dog.

“This,” he said, “this is a great girl. This is a girl deserving of old Wu’s son.”

Even though this comment had come from a drunken gambler, I felt like it was a benediction of sorts. Matt seemed proud, but he also shifted his weight from leg to leg, as if he didn’t know if we should make a run for it or not before the other men began.

And indeed, the chorus started immediately. “Come sit with us,” they said. “We want to do some winning too.”

“No, she stays with me.” Matt was still only fifteen then, but he stood up in front of me and faced the whole group of gamblers. I was close enough that I could feel him tremble slightly. For the first time, I began to feel afraid, and then someone started to laugh.

“Okay, but bring her again. We can always use some luck.”

Matt never took me there again, but I think it was because I had seen what he’d wanted me to see. He had shown me his shameful secret, and I had accepted it. It seemed a kind of turning point for us, a promise of trust and openness, and maybe even love.

This was before the girl started showing up.

By tenth grade, I was one of the best students, despite my continued disadvantage in English. Unlike the other kids, I hid my test scores immediately and never spoke about them.

Annette was my source of information. She told me on the phone one evening, “You would not believe the things they say about you. I heard Julia Williams telling this other girl that you never sleep and you never study.”

It was true that I didn’t manage to sleep much, but I couldn’t imagine how Julia Williams, a girl with tight golden ringlets, could possibly know that. My only opportunities to do homework at the factory were snatched during the brief breaks and on the subway, and we usually arrived at home after nine o’clock. By the time I got my homework done, I was so exhausted that I dropped straight onto my mattress and went to sleep.

There was a pause on the line and I could hear the low rumbling of static. “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“The way you are in class. And like that last history test-I know you hardly studied for it. I mean, the day before the test, you hadn’t even read the chapters yet.”

I stared down at my hands. “I don’t know. It’s like being born with an extra head or something.”

But in a way, now that my English was fairly fluent, I didn’t find my academic achievements to be so remarkable. I simply did what the teachers assigned as best I could and regurgitated what I had learned on the tests. Sometimes I had to do all the preparation at the last moment because I had no choice, but I always got it done. School was my only ticket out and just being in this privileged school wasn’t enough; I still needed to win a full scholarship to a prestigious college, and to excel there enough to get a good job.

In tenth grade, I enrolled in AP classes, even though they were generally for juniors and seniors. Later, at the end of the year, I would receive the top score, a 5, on all of my exams. For this kind of thing, the other Harrison kids looked at me with mingled respect and jealousy, but not with what I longed for, which was friendship. Despite Annette’s presence, I was lonely. I wanted to be a part of things, but I didn’t know how.

My skin was now clear and Ma had finally let me grow my hair out. I was a perfect size six and I could take samples from the factory, which made my attire less noticeably inadequate. But my obligations to Ma and the factory didn’t allow room for social ambitions. And even if they had, I was perceived as-or I really was-too serious. I never went to parties or dances.

On the rare occasions when I was invited somewhere, I made excuses without even trying to ask Ma for permission. I kept a deliberate distance from the other girls because I knew it would inevitably lead to an invitation to their house, and I wouldn’t be able to go. I already snuck off once in a while to see Annette; I couldn’t fit anyone else in.

And at least I had Annette, who understood and accepted the things I couldn’t do, even if she had no idea of the true details of my life. She often came to the library when I was working there and had become a great admirer of Mr. Jamali. In private, she’d go on and on to me about how incredibly wise and beautiful he was. Annette’s likes were always intense. Her crushes were fleeting and left no real imprint upon her heart. She’d even had an interest in Curt, who had broken up with Sheryl over the summer. For a period of about two weeks, Annette had raved about how artistic he was, how creative and free. Sometime in the last year, he had stopped wearing his neat designer clothes and now went around in worn cotton trousers and old T-shirts underneath his blue blazer. But a few months after the crush began, she found him boring because too many other girls liked him too. All of this happened without any actual interaction with Curt himself, of course. For Annette, a crush was an activity more than a feeling, and she liked it best when I pretended to like the same boy she did so we could talk about him together, much the way other kids shared a passion for a hobby like baseball.

I didn’t mind. I enjoyed pretending to have more of a normal life when I talked to Annette. It allowed me the luxury of imagining I was richer and better off than I actually was. It was also too hard to tell someone how we lived when there was so little chance of change. We had long ago given up the idea that Aunt Paula would do anything to improve our situation. We were still paying off our debt to her, which left little money to spare. We could barely afford the things I needed to buy, like new shoes when I grew out of my old ones. Our only hope was when the building would actually be condemned and she would have to move us out.

In my other life, I could feel the buzz of Matt’s presence whenever he was at the steamers, whenever he went to take a break. He seemed to walk around in a halo of light. It was as if every excruciating detail of his face, his hands, his clothing was imprinted upon my mind.

I once made the mistake of saying to him, “Your pants look different.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I don’t know, something about the way they fit,” I faltered, realizing I was getting onto unstable ground.

He looked at me strangely, then said, “Actually, if you have to know, it’s probably because I’m not wearing any underwear today.”

I laughed awkwardly, as if it were a joke and I were the sort of girl who could laugh casually at such things, but the truth was, I was secretly an expert on Matt’s ass and I’m quite sure he was telling the truth. I never did dare to ask the reason for the omission, although I imagine it was because he’d run out of clean underwear.

On the rare occasions when Park, Matt and I had some extra time, we would gather for a few precious moments outside. One day, when I came downstairs, I saw Park fixing the chain on Matt’s cargo bike while Matt watched.